Tuesday, November 13, 2012

Another chapter I wrote for Hit Lit was deemed too confrontational. I admit this chapter which juxtaposes passages from contemporaneous reviews of the bestsellers I was analyzing with reviews of the big literary novel of the day, may strike some as pugnacious. That's true. I feel pretty strongly about this stuff and am willing to fight for my position. I think that's one of the things which makes books like Hit Lit worth reading. They provoke thought. They take a position. They spoil for a fight.

I regret that this chapter didn't make it into the finished book.

Unputdownable
Schmaltz

“In the room the
women come and go talking of Michelangelo.”

T.S.
Eliot, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

Popular novels are “embarrassing to pick up
and impossible to put down.”They are schmaltzy,
full of cliches, down-to-earth, simple-minded, written in accessible prose, all the things
that readers love and book reviewers despise.

Book reviewers are
on the front lines of the literary culture wars.Empowered by their positions at big city
newspapers and national magazines, these under-appreciated warriors bravely
endure the bombardment of crappy books that rain down on their lonely outposts
every day.

The job of these professional critics is to praise
the worthy and condemn the undeserving, to advance the literary principles they
hold dear.

It is in the words of these reliable defenders of high culture
values that I open our investigation of bestsellers.By understanding specifically what the stakes
and standards are, we can begin to map out the territory we will explore in the
pages to come.

Rhapsodies of Beauty

1936 Gone
With The Wind vs. The Big Money

In 1936 Margaret Mitchell won the Pulitzer Prize for Gone With The Wind.Did that mean recognition and literary
acceptance from the elites?Not
exactly.

It was an honor that many literati regarded as cheap pandering to the
rabble, an act of aesthetic gutlessness by the selection committee meant to
avoid controversy.As if to prove it, the
American Writer’s Congress which awarded the other major literary prize of that
era, was not cowed by popular opinion when they bitch-slapped Scarlett lovers
everywhere by awarding the best book of the year prize to John Dos Passos for
his modernist treatise, The Big Money.The final vote of the awards
committee? Mitchell: 1. Dos Passos, 350.

That year John Dos Passos was the darling of the high culture critics.Like other reviewers, Edward T. Wheeler,
writing in Commonweal hailed “Dos Passos' sense of form and artistic sureness
which tips its hat to Joyce, Pound, and
Eliot, and gives much satisfaction.”

(Bold emphasis is mine here and throughout this chapter.)

Comparing an author to Joyce, Pound and
Eliot, that triumvirate of Modernists, is a way of saluting a writer for
employing, among other things, disjointed stream-of-consciousness narratives
and long, elaborate sentences.(Absalom,
Absalom! which was also published in 1936, and is generally regarded as
William Faulkner’s masterpiece, had the distinction of winning a Guiness World
Record for containing literature’s longest sentence of 1300 words.)

“The Modernists introduced us to the idea that reading could be work, and
not common labor but the work of an intellectual elite, a highly trained coterie
of professional aesthetic interpreters,” says Lev Grossman, writing in the Wall
Street Journal.He goes on to quote one
of the modernist mottoes of an early publisher of Joyce: "Make no
compromise with the public taste."A kind of ‘let them eat cake’ slogan of snobbish contempt.

Any reference to James Joyce in a book
review should be a warning flag for the attentive reader:Alert, Alert, Serious Literature Ahead.For it is Joyce, more than any other novelist,
who clarified the differences between the literary high road and the mass
culture low.About Ulysses, Edmund Wilson famously wrote
in the New Republic: "In the last pages of the book, Joyce soars to such rhapsodies of beauty as have probably
never been equaled in English prose fiction."Those rhapsodies have served as a yardstick
for novels ever since.

So when Dos Passos was praised for his Modernist daring, the reviewer was commending
his willingness to ditch ordinary storytelling and character-making, all that
malarkey that would appeal to a casual reader-for-pleasure.

It worked just fine for Dos Passos, although some social critics have argued
that Modernism had a nefarious agenda which was to purposefully exclude the
masses.

"The
intellectuals could not, of course, actually prevent the masses from attaining
literacy. But they could prevent them reading literature by making it too
difficult for them to understand—and this is what they did. The early twentieth
century saw a determined effort, on the part of the European intelligentsia, to
exclude the masses from culture. In England this movement has become known as Modernism.
--John Carey, The Intellectuals and the Masses

Favoring technical virtuosity over
story and character is business as usual when it comes to dismissing popular
novels, as these snippets from reviews of Gone With The Wind make
brutally clear.Each of these critics takes pains to declare that
GWTW isn’t a “great novel” just a good one, before giving the only praise they
can muster.

"I would never, never say that she has
written a great novel, but in the midst of triteness and sentimentality her
book has a simple-minded courage…” New
Republic - Malcolm Cowley

"Gone With The Windis by no means a great novel. But it is
a long while since the American reading public has been offered such a
bounteous feast of excellent storytelling...."New York Times Book Review

All right. So great novels require hard
work.They are stories which use
difficult-to-follow narrative devices and elaborate sentences, and rhapsodies
of beauty (that is, they’re sort of poetic).And books that are not so great are simple and full of emotion and
include lots of familiar characters and other familiar stuff.In other words, they’re too fun and easy to
be any good.

Okay, so, let’s leave Scarlett and Dos Passos to battle it out for their
piece of posterity, and skip ahead twenty years to mid-twentieth century.

Joyce Again

1956, Peyton
Place vs. The Recognitions

In 1956, the year Peyton Place
titillated America, William Gaddis published his first novel, The Recognitions
to bountiful praise. Time magazine’s reviewer raved, at one point
invoking that embodiment of high culture values when he described the book as “aswim in erudition, semi-Joycean in language…”

There’s our boy, James, again.

By contrast, Peyton Place was
hammered by reviewers, most of whom were shocked, shocked I tell you, by its
immorality and obscenity.Unsurprisingly,
Catholic World was beside itself with contempt for this lurid book.

“This
novel is one of the cheapest, most blatant attempts in years to present the
most noxiously commonplace in ideas
and behavior in the

loose and ill-worn guise of
realistic art.”

‘Noxiously commonplace’ might be decoded to mean that the novel is not about
the uplifting and the spiritual, or those values that Ms. Katukani found so
worthy in the Gaddis novel.The low road
is common, while the high road, well, it’s for those traveling in the big
leather seats up-front.

The New York Herald Tribune chimed in with a harsh assessment of Peyton
Place that probably was intended to be a crushing blow, but which
undoubtedly sent tantalized readers running to the stores:

“…sex
is the dominant accent of the book and Mrs. Metalious, in her

effort to be realistic, spares
neither detail or language in high-lighting her scenes in bed, car or on the
beach. Invariable, even in moments which should be tender and understanding,
she injects an offensively crude note. In fact the book reads like a tabloid version of life in a small
town.”

Okay, so Peyton Place wasn’t
“aswim in erudition.” Agreed.Grace
Metalious had attempted no literary cartwheels to please the swanky folks.She apparently had more mundane goals in
mind.Julian Messner is one of the few
critics who got it.In his Time magazine
review he writes that Metalious “captures a real sense of the tempo, texture
and tensions in the social anatomy of a small town. Her ear for local speech is
unflinching down to the last four-letter word, and her characters have a sort
of rawboned vitality that may produce
low animal moans in many a critic's throat.”

In other words, it was just the sort of
writing that had been appealing to novel readers for a couple of
centuries.Hardcore reality, not
erudition.Close to the earth, not up in
the clouds.

Impossibly Rich, Monstrously Long

1960To Kill a Mockingbird vs. The Sot
Weed Factor, John Barth

In 1960 Time Magazine picked John Barth’s novels as one of its All Time 100
Best Novels, largely for its technical virtuosity—a novel about novel writing:

“A feast. Dense, funny, endlessly inventive (and, OK,
yes, long-winded) this satire of the 18th-century picaresque novel—think
Fielding's Tom Jones or Sterne's Tristram Shandy —is also an earnest picture of
the pitfalls awaiting innocence as it makes its unsteady way in the world…
Barth's language is impossibly rich, a
wickedly funny take on old English rhetoric and American self-appraisals.”

The New York Times agreed that like any good literary novel, this was
definitely not some lightweight page-turner:

“John Barth’s
The Sot-Weed Factor is a brilliantly specialized performance, so monstrously long that reading it seemed
nearly as laborious as writing it…”

For reasons that elude me, book critics have often showered praise on
books for the amazing triumph of being lengthy.Saul Bellow’s celebrated novel, The Adventures of Augie March,
was praised by a New York Times reviewer in this head-scratching manner:

“Individual episodes are superb. Peculiar conversations are
delightful. They justify, it seems to me, the effort required to read the more
than a quarter of a million words of this inchoate novel…

Also appearing in 1960, the lean,
pruned down story of Scout and Atticus and Jem got a slightly different
treatment.Garnering modestly positive
reviews, To Kill A Mockingbird didn’t sit well with some of the high
priests of its day.A few critics
rebuked Harper Lee for her un-Joycean style, and the even more vile sin of
being influenced by Hollywood.

“The praise that Miss Lee deserves must
be qualified somewhat by noting that oftentimes the narrator's expository style has a processed, homogenized, impersonal
flatness quite out of keeping with the narrator's gay, impulsive approach to
life in youth. Also, some of the scenes suggest that Miss Lee is cocking at least one eye toward Hollywood...”Frank H. Lyell, The New York Times Book
Review

The National Book Award that year went to Conrad Richter for The Waters
of Kronos, a novel which garnered kudos for its “portentous prose and insistent symbolism.”

So, mark that down.According to high
culture mavens, a convoluted plot, a self-conscious narrator, and an intricate
style are virtues, while a clean and simple style is of questionable
merit.And any indication that a
novelist might be operating under the influence of Hollywood is cause for censure.

Cerebral Musings

1966Valley of the Dolls vs. The Crying
of Lot 49

In 1966, the same year Jacqueline Sussan published Valley of the Dolls,
Thomas Pynchon released his shortest and most accessible novel, The Crying
of Lot 49.His previous novel, V,
had seen him welcomed into the high culture fold with this now familiar nod to
our friend James Joyce.

“The masterpiece of the new manner, a book called simply V. is an epic of planned irrelevance that Joyce
would surely have respected.” (Time, March 15, 1963)

The Crying of Lot 49 was met with similar delight, and was again
awarded the keys to the literary kingdom.A Time magazine reviewer admired it greatly. “With its slapstick
paranoia and its heartbreaking metaphysical
soliloquies, Lot 49 takes place in the tragicomic universe that is instantly
recognizable as Pynchon-land.”

Meanwhile Valley of the Dolls, was treated to a series of hatchet
jobs.Gloria Steinem, writing in Book
Week, made a standard put-down, associating the book with Hollywood.In this case, Ms. Steinem connects Valley
of the Dolls with the lowest circle of that hellish town.

"For the
reader who has put away comic books but isn't ready for editorials in The Daily
News, "Valley of the Dolls" may bridge an awkward gap… Most of the
dialog is less classic-bad than television-bad, and Sussan, a former TV
actress, churns it out like a pro.”

What was true in the mid-sixties is still true today.Plucked from various twenty-first century
reviews of books that the New York Times considered the most notable novels of
the year are phrases that closely echo the code words of praise for Pynchon’s
early novels.

Without naming
titles, here are some key descriptors of a couple of heralded books of
2005:“This graceful and dreamily cerebral novel…”Another novel won this rave: “her ruminations on beauty and cruelty have
clarity and an uncanny bite.”

That
the highbrow critic gives such laudatory treatment to works that contain
dreamy, graceful, cerebral ruminations, suggests a favoritism toward fiction
strong on narcissistic intellectualism and not too interested in a hard-driving
plot or a passionate emotional sensibility.A well-structured, exciting narrative that contains realistic characters
who inspire strong emotional responses is red-tagged as lowbrow.As if somehow these feats of writing are so
easily accomplished they are beneath the lofty abilities of the dreamy
cerebralists.

Though I must
say, in the forty years I taught fiction writing to hundreds of talented
writers, it became abundantly clear that tapping out metaphysical soliloquies
and dreamy cerebral ruminations is the easiest and least demanding skill to
master, while crafting a tight, forward-moving plot full of engaging characters
proves considerably more of a challenge.

Disembodied
Howling

1969, The Godfather vs. Steps

In 1969 Jerzy
Kosinski won the National Book Award for his short, intense novel, Steps,
a book composed of brief fragmentary scenes loosely connected into a series of
mini-chapters.

Years later,
David Foster Wallace, a twenty-first century novelist with impeccable literary
credentials, wrote that Steps was a "collection of unbelievably
creepy little allegorical tableaux done in a terse elegant voice that's like nothing else anywhere ever…"

In a 1974 article
admiring Kosinski’s novel, Samuel Coale described the narrator of Steps
as “a disembodied voice howling in
some surrealistic wilderness."And
Harpers Magazine praised Kosinski’s writing as having “the linguistic bravado of Conrad and Nabokov…a master of pungent and
disciplined English prose.”

This
emphasis on uniqueness of style, and on the inventive use of voice are more
arrows in the quiver of high culture warriors.A novel that relies on prose that is merely transparently simple or even
primitive in its construction can never fully partake in the feasting that goes
on at the literary head table.

Such
primitivism is the hallmark of Mario Puzo’s prose, and to many readers this
seems entirely suitable for a book about such primitive folks as the
Corleones.But in 1969, the critics were
not giving any blue ribbons to Puzo as a stylist.Critic Wilfrid Sheed was typical of the
prevailing view when he described the prose ofThe Godfather as "speed writing clichés."

In fact, even in reviews meant to praise
The Godfather critics often used patronizing language of the most
obvious sort.

Dick Schaap’s
New York Times review was particularly condescending.Though thankfully he doesn’t mention James
Joyce, Schaap does raise the issue of Hollywood when he instructs potential
readers how to prepare themselves for confronting The Godfather.

“Allow for a touch of corniness here. Allow for a bit of
over-dramatization there. Allow for an almost total absence of humor. Still
Puzo has written a solid story that you can read without discomfort at one long
sitting. Pick a night with nothing good
on television, and you'll come out far ahead.”

Puzo
was under no illusions about his capabilities as a stylist.He was aware he was not capable of “linguist
bravado” or a “terse elegant voice.”Though he was prideful enough to believe he could have improved the
writing, given a second chance. "If
I'd known so many people were going to read it," Puzo told Larry King,
"I'd have written it better."

To
millions of readers, however, Puzo’s style is just right.As primitive as a cave painting and just as
powerful.

Twilight
Zone

1971, The Exorcist vs. Mr.
Sammler’s Planet

Gorgeous
sentences and stylistic grace are also central in the praise for Mr.
Sammler’s Planet, Saul Bellow’s 1971 National Book Award winning novel.

Irvin Stock in
Commentary Magazine, equates the musicality of the sentences with the very
thought processes of the main character, a technique that sounds a whole lot
like Joycean stream-of-consciousness.

“Bellow has a gift, reminiscent of Wordsworth, for
evoking in his very sentence rhythms, as
well as in his words, the experience of thought, the drama of its emergence
out of the life of the whole man.”

Also lauding the
novel, Joyce Carol Oates uses the imagery of someone who’s trapped in a
revolving door and decides she likes it.For her, the ending was “so powerful that it forces us to immediately
reread the entire novel, because we have been altered in the process of reading
it and are now, at its conclusion, ready to begin reading it.”And when she’s finished the second
reading?It makes me dizzy just thinking
about it.

Anatole Broyard
doesn’t actually use the words, dreamy,
cerebral ruminations in his New York Times review, but he comes darn
close.

“Arthur Sammler is old enough to be metaphysical. Beyond desire, beyond competition, with nothing
further to gain or prove, he lives in
thattwilight zone of the human
condition where philosophy, poetry and parody shade into each other.”

Also inhabiting
a twilight zone is Reagan MacNeil, the girl child at the center of The
Exorcist, though her twilight isanything but dreamy.This novel
of demonic possession didn’t impress most reviewers with its stylistic virtues:

“Faulkner, Blatty is not…I consumed The Exorcist as if it
were a bottomless bag of popcorn.It’s a
page-turner par excellence.I variously believed, discredited and
respected The Exorcist.”--Webster Schott, Life

It’s funny to
watch certified high culture reviewers like Mr. Schott squirming when torn
between admiration and disdain.Poor guy
can’t believe he liked this book.

A reviewer for the Los Angeles Times who found the novel “immensely
satisfying” also called it “worthy of Poe.”

While I’m sure
some might view this as validation of The Exorcist, the fact is,
dropping Edgar Allan Poe’s name is a far cry from invoking James Joyce’s. As
the first American master of the ghastly, ghostly and gory, Poe has long been
treated as an embarrassing sideshow in the American literary canon, a kind of
crazy uncle who is tolerated but goes largely ignored.Despite his literary merits and historical
significance, Poe, the horror meister, is usually quarantined well away from
the respectable districts, lest his telltale creepiness contaminate the faint-hearted
sophisticates.

Mentioning his name
in a book review is at best a back-handed compliment and at worst an overt
signal to the literarily-minded that the work being judged is for the
adolescent down-market audience.

R.Z. Sheppard,
the Time magazine reviewer, wasn’t at all coy in his disemboweling of The
Exorcist.

“The Exorcist… has nothing to do with literature.
It is a pretentious, tasteless,
abominably written, redundant pastiche of superficial theology, comic-book
psychology, Grade C movie dialogue and Grade Z scatology. In short, The Exorcist
will be a bestseller and almost certainly a drive-in movie.”

Well, he got two things right.

Nightmares

1984, The Hunt for Red October
vs. Machine Dreams

In
1984 we have the reviews of two first novels to compare, one considered
thrillingly complex, the other a simple-minded thriller.Both feature nightmare scenarios, though the
nightmares in Machine Dreams are psychological not thermonuclear.

Sensitized by now
to reviewer-speak, it’s easy to see this star-on-the-forehead approach to
matters of stylistic gracefulness.Ms.
Kukatani goes on to admire other technical virtuosities of the narrative structure,
using phrases that remind me of those uppity fashion designers on the TV series
“Project Runway” who laud the needlework on some otherwise daffy ensemble.

“Though sections of ''Machine
Dreams'' easily lift out and function as short stories, they have been stitched
together seamlessly into a beautifully patterned novel that possesses the
density of a highly ambitious work of art…”

Art wasn’t on
President Ronald Reagan’s mind when he read Tom Clancy’s first novel.Or so he said at a televised news conference
when he announced that he enjoyed the book, calling it "unputdownable"
and a "perfect yarn."

Without that
endorsement, this fledgling novelist published by a press that had never
ventured into fictional waters before might have languished in obscurity.But his publisher, Naval Institute Press of
Annapolis, which made its name printing works like Dictionary of Naval
Abbreviations, was no doubt overjoyed by Ronald Reagan’s promo on its
behalf, though surely unprepared for the tidal wave of orders that ensued.

Hardly any reviews
of The Hunt for Red October appeared prior to the president’s rave. But
eventually the critics came around, if only to have a chance to fire off
zingers.

Could reviewers
actually be so shameless as to be motivated by a desire to skewer?You betcha, said David Shaw, writing in the
Los Angeles Times in the mid-eighties.

“…book review editors… tend to be
intellectuals--or, if not intellectuals, at least far more interested in
Serious Literature, both fiction and nonfiction, than in the kinds of books
that usually dominate the best-seller lists.”

In a three part
investigative article, Mr. Shaw exposed the inner workings of the book review
business of that era.(Though I suspect
most of it is still true.)Some of his disclosures
are remarkable confessions of the lip-smacking snobbery at work in the
journalistic wing of the book business.

“Most book review editors don't even bother to publish reviews of
popular genre books--romances, Westerns, science fiction--and, except for
the most highly touted titles, most publish only periodic roundups of mysteries
and other genre fiction.

“These
books tend to be formulaic, book review editors say, and there is little
for a reviewer to write that would differentiate one from another. The same is
true, they say, of much popular fiction; that's why some papers give these
books only the briefest of reviews.

“Even when one of these books is reviewed in
full, there is a tendency for both the
review editor and the reviewer to use the review as an opportunity to compose
snide, clever put-downs that make incontrovertibly clear the intellectual and
moral superiority of the reviewer (and the publication) to the author (and
his book).”

Unputdownable

1991, The Firm vs Mating

The year John Grisham’s second novel appeared, the National
Book Award committee passed him by and instead anointed Norman Rush for his
first novel Mating.The reviews
for Mating were overwhelmingly positive, and overwhelmingly similar in
emphasizing the intellectuality of the novel.

“…one of the wisest and wittiest fictional meditations ever written on the
subject of mating… presented in an
allusive, freewheeling first-person narrative of impressive intelligence. The
reader's education is tested and expanded by the fast and self-conscious
company of the narrator and her beloved, people whose mordant wordplay is sly and pleasantly unobtrusive.”

Perhaps the reader
of literary fiction finds “fictional meditations” or novels of “intellectual
sweep” to be compelling.But compelling
doesn’t seem to be a code word that book reviewers commonly associate with
literary novels.Nor is page-turner
or unputdownable.Presumably this
is because the style and poetic language of literary novels requires a more
leisurely and disciplined pace, more focus, more care.The New York Times said as much when praising
an Editor’s Choice selection:

“One should read this first novel as slowly as poetry, and for the same reason:
The language is so precise, so distilled and so beautiful one does not want to
miss any pleasure it might yield up to patience.”

Mark Twain once
addressed the compellingness issue when he quipped about the dreadfully serious
novels of Henry James:

“Once you've put one of his books down, you
simply can't pick it up again.”

That’s funny, yes,
but this page-turner issue is more complicated than it might first appear, for
clearly there are those for whom Henry James is unputdownable.That’s why they read—to go slow, to savor
every subtle pleasure.To smooth out the
brain waves.

My classes in
bestsellers often mingled literature Ph.D. students with candidates for an MFA
in creative writing—sometimes a contentious mix.The literature students, who were likely to
revere the novels of James Joyce and Henry James and others in the literary
canon, often found themselves at odds with their more commercially-minded
classmates over aesthetic matters.To
them a novel that was a “fast read” was somehow suspicious.Though before the semester was over, even the
most hardcore of the literary purists had usually found one or two bestsellers
on the list that blindsided them, swept them away and shook their faith in
their literary presumptions, leaving them with a new ambivalence.

Their ambivalence
was similar to the mixed feelings I experienced when I first started reading
bestsellers for my original course.I
was expecting to experience the tedium of wretched prose and trite and
hackneyed melodrama, but found myself ignoring all those issues as the stories
gripped me and sent me on a breathless thrill ride through their pages.

Claudia Rossett, a
book reviewer for the Wall Street Journal, once admitted to a similar
experience in a review of a Jackie Collins potboiler.She’d started the book fully armed to do a
little trash-bashing but found herself instead describing the book as
“embarrassing to pick up and impossible to put down.”

Ambivalence didn’t confuse Marilyn Stasio, the mystery
reviewer for the New York Times, when she was evaluating John Grisham’s The
Firm.And compelling wasn’t
on her list of adjectives, though putdowns were flying.

“Mr. Grisham, a criminal
defense attorney, writes with such relish about the firm's devious legal
practices that his novel might be taken as a how-to manual for ambitious
tax-law students. Of more concern, though, are the pernicious values that
motivate Mitch's preposterous heroics
in eluding both the mob and the Feds. If
this money-grubbing worm is what passes for a hero in today's legal profession,
we'll stick with Portia.”

(Personal aside:Coincidentally,
in that same multi-book review in which Marilyn Stasio dings Grisham, she had
nice things to say about my third novel, including this: “…his prose runs as
clean and fast as Gulf Stream waters…”Which I offer as a testament to the fact that there’s no automatic
connection between positive reviews and becoming a household name.)

Peter
Prescott in Newsweek was greatly impressed with The Firm’s unputdownability:

“It also offers an irresistible plot. A plot that seizes
a reader on the opening page and propels him through 400 more is much rarer
in commercial fiction than is generally supposed.”

While the fastness
or slowness of a book may be more of a reflection of a reader’s subjective
experience than an actual count of the minutes and hours required to finish the
book, speed is clearly a term of endearment for readers of popular
novels while it has dubious merit to those on the other side of the aisle.

Corn

1992, Bridges of Madison County vs. A Thousand
Acres

These
two novels, both set along the back roads and cornfields of Iowa, received
markedly different treatment by reviewers.

A
Thousand Acres scored gold medals all round. "Brilliant…A thrilling
work of art” they sang out in Chicago, and New York pronounced it “powerful and
poignant” while Boston thought it was a “full commanding novel” and Washington
considered it “written beautifully.”

By
far the most consistent form of praise the book received was for Jane Smiley’s
artful reworking of Shakespeare’s King Lear, her use of the play as structural
underpinning for her plot and the source of her cast of characters.

Overtly
inviting comparisons to Shakespeare might seem a risky strategy, but most
reviewers believed this audacious experiment was successful.

Ron
Carlson, reviewing the book for the New York Times, nimbly side-steps the
question of whether the novel relied too much on Lear.

“I was reluctant, in writing about
the novel, to invoke "King Lear" (and it will be invoked, believe me)
because I didn't want this story to sound like an exercise, like some clever,
layered construct. What A Thousand Acres does is to remind us again of
why "King Lear" has lasted.”

Is that praise or its
opposite?I’m not quite sure.

And it really
doesn’t matter, does it?The effect is
the same.The “hook” as they say in
Hollywood has been set.Once the book
was tagged as “Lear in the cornfields” this talking point was firmly
established thereafter.

The reviewer for
the Chicago Tribune went so far as to say that reading Smiley’s novel might
enhance one’s experience with Shakespeare.

“You will never again read
"King Lear" in the same way after finishing Jane Smiley's stark and
scarifying new novel, which retells Lear's story from his daughters' point of
view. It turns each premise of the play inside out, yet it too examines, with
near-Shakespearean depth, the existential horrors that crawl out into the light
when the rock of family solidarity is shattered.”

As the reviewer
points out, it wasn’t necessary to know a thing about Lear in order to be
gripped by this tale, but still, the not-so-secret-code at work here is that a
reader who picks up this novel will be encountering to some degree or another
one of the great masters of English literature.

It’s hard to top
that.Not even a tip of the hat to James
Joyce or Moby Dick can quite compare.

No
book reviewer in the land was about to suggest that Robert James Waller’s
tearjerker was connected in any way to William Shakespeare.Corniness in the cornfield, maybe.Some serious leering, but no Lear.

Pauli
Carnes in the LA Times thought the novel was “yuppie women's porno” and ends
her piece with this badda-bing: "The Bridges of Madison County is
not beautiful and touching. It is the story of life wasted.”

And
here are a few even harsher comeuppances:

1.“…a
Hallmark card for all those who have loved and lost: a mushy memorial to a brief encounter in the Midwest.”

2.“…a fantasy that only a man could have written.
Like its hero, it presents itself as God's gift to women even as it furthers
their subjugation.”

3."…like a Coke that's been opened a while
ago: sweet but flat."

4.“an insipid,
fatuous, mealy-mouthed third-rate soap opera with a semi-fascist point of
view.”

5.“The erotic and spiritual charge that they
generate is equivalent to 10,000 volts, and the time given to express it is
four days and three nights. Divide them by fate, and add the torches they carry
ever after. How many gallons of schmaltz
do you end up with?”

What is it about
schmaltz that pisses off so many highbrow people, and activates the tear ducts of so many
others?The word schmaltz derives
from Yiddish roots, meaning rendered or melted chicken fat.Anyone familiar with the wonders of high
density fat can appreciate the Yiddish idiom of “falling into the schmaltz pot”
which translates roughly to having something awesome happen to you.Like winning the Lotto or being born with a
thick, beautiful head of hair.

In the Thirties
the word turned derogatory, and began its new life as a descriptor for things
which were sentimental, maudlin or florid.We have Vanity Fair to thank for that, because the first recorded use of
schmaltz as a disparaging adjective was in that magazine in 1935, when a
writer described a certain kind of jazz music as “schmaltzy.”In other words, the gooey, oh so rich and
tasty, oh so artery-clogging thing which is so bad for you.

And there you have
it.

One
major fault line between low culture and high is schmaltz.The lovers of comfort food versus fussy
eaters.Those who like a good wallow in
the schmaltz pot versus the purists who prefer the leafiest greens and leanest
cuts.The gluttonous gulpers of the
heavy-on-the-fat buffet vs. the connoisseurs of haute cuisine.

Postmodern

2003, The Da Vinci Code vs Middlesex

Finally
let’s take a look at two books that share one major thematic concern:
gender.One nabbed the Pulitzer Prize
and the Oprah’s Book Club stamp of approval, the other walked away with bags of
cash.

Unlike
the sex of his protagonist, most of the reviews for Jeffrey Eugenidies’
gender-bending family saga and coming of age novel were unmixed.

Lisa
Zeidner in the Washington Post believed Middlesex provided "… not
only incest à la Ada and a Lolita-style road trip, but enough dense detail to keep fans of close reading manically busy.”

Warning
for schmaltz-lovers:This cuisine is
very haute and must be vigilantly chewed.

More
praise came from Daniel Mendelsohn of The New York Times who liked the book for
its "dense narrative, interwoven
with sardonic, fashionably postmodern commentary."

Need
I decode this?Haven’t we seen these
cryptograms before?Of course.Prepare to go slow, savor the language.And watch out, gentle reader, because this is
second generation modernism.So if you
didn’t grasp the aesthetics on the first go-round you might want to do a little
catching up before you take this on.

Marta
Salij of the Detroit Free Press liked the book's portrayal of Detroit so much
she alluded to one of our favorite benchmark writers.

Finally “Detroit has its great
novel. What Dublin got from James
Joyce—a sprawling, ambitious, loving, exasperated and playful chronicle of
all its good and bad parts—Detroit has from native son Eugenides in these 500
pages."

Dan Brown’s reviews ranged from scathing to extremely
scathing.

New Yorker writer Anthony Lane, whose article on bestsellers
I quoted from earlier, blows away the novel in this giddy one-liner:

“…if a person of sound
mind begins reading the book at ten o’clock in the morning, at what time will
he or she come to the realization that it is unmitigated junk? The answer, in my case, was 10:00.03, shortly
after I read the opening sentence…”

"The Da
Vinci Code" is indeed a cheesy
thriller, with all the familiar qualities of the genre at its worst: characters so thin they're practically
transparent, ludicrous dialogue, and prose that's 100 percent cliché… the
plot is simply one long chase sequence...”

Cheesy
junk food, fit for the unfit, the slobs, the couch potatoes.

Though no reviewer invoked the name of
James Joyce, there was one notable exception to the Brown-bashing.Janet Maslin, reviewer of pop culture texts
for the New York Times, found Mr. Brown to be on the side of the angels, and
his work to be a “gleefully erudite
suspense novel…”

There again is one of our code words, a term usually reserved for the high
culture brand.Surely this use of
“erudite” confused the issue for some, suggesting this novel was haute
cuisine-ish when it was, in truth, closer to gourmet popcorn.

It’s possible that some of the
multitudes who bought the novel, did find the book to be “aswim in
erudition.”However, based on the
sampling I pulled from the Amazon.com ‘customer reviews’ it appears that many
felt they got less bang for their buck than they were promised.Customer reviewers were almost evenly split
between fans and haters.Of the 4,000
readers who took the time to write reviews and award stars (from one to five),
the five star reviews were less than half the total.While those who could not find it in their
heart to give The Da Vinci Code more than one or two stars was almost an
equal number.For almost every reader
who found the book “incredibly exciting” there was another who considered it “a
swindle” or “abysmal.”

Okay, okay.Enough of deciphering the not so hidden biases of reviews.

You’ll have to take my word that I have not cherry-picked the comparison
books or the quoted material in this section.To test my arguments, I invite skeptical readers to scan this week’s
book review in almost any city newspaper or national magazine and see if you
don’t find many of the same code words of praise embedded in the analyses of
books considered literary.And the same
dismissive critiques of any book whose story moves too quickly and whose
characters are too hot and juicy and too perfect for the silver screen.

The fact that reviewers consistently take a dim view of some
of the very books that attract millions of readers is proof of the ongoing
culture wars that have long been waged in the arts.That the masses want to read a book that
grabs them by the lapels and doesn’t let go, even if it might be populated by
stereotypes and written in prose that is clichéd and trite, gives us a good
starting place for a study of what makes the biggest bestsellers of all time succeed
on a grand scale.

Schmaltzy, clichéd, trite, melodramatic, one-dimensional,
transparent, cheesy, sentimental.Yes,
yes, all twelve of these books are to some degree guilty as charged.

But there are other
fascinating factors these twelve novels share, features that are not so obvious
on first glance, and which in the long run helped the books transcend their
‘faults.’Those are the issues I’ll be
addressing in the following eleven chapters, starting with a look at a few
techniques used by each of our twelve bestsellers, devices that had much to do
with making these particular novels fly off the shelves and the pages fly by
and helped send each of these novels flying higher into the stratosphere of
sales than all others.

2 comments:

You’re engaged in antiquated thinking when it comes to schmaltz-killing by literary critics. The rise of women and minority writers in the marketplace has shifted the emphasis from quality to “giving voice” — meaning that as long as the writer conveys an empathetic story where the protagonist overcomes the obstacles of the white majority without compromising their cultural authenticity, that particular voice scores brownie points despite a pedantic immature style. It all started in writing workshops (similar to the one I took with you at FIU in the mid-1970s). Instructors are loathe to discourage mediocre or even untalented writing students and instead rationalize their encouragement by allowing the student to “give voice” to their individual experience, which these days usually addresses gender or race inequalities — real or not. Today, contemporary fiction is rife with crybabies who can’t write but are empowered by their underdog status. Meanwhile, the marketplace sucks up this stuff because any numbskull reads that discharge and thinks, “well, I can write that. Of course the issues at hand are never that simple, but in the end I would argue that the rise of identity-writing is more destructive than mass-market dynamics.